Ideal Home Show: Why tomorrow never came

Welcome to the future: round doors and space cake never quite took off as the visionaries hoped

Chris Stevens

12:01AM GMT 08 Mar 2008

Sixties designers predicted a wildly glamorous future, in which hi-tech gadgets blended seamlessly with space-age living. On the eve of the 100th Ideal Home Show, Chris Stevens asks, what became of the age of optimism?

Read any science magazine from the 1960s and you'll find it packed with glamorous predictions of how we'd be living in our 21st century homes of the future. From videophones and climate-controlled domes, to 3D televisions and bathrooms moulded entirely from a single sheet of plastic, for a while, this Jetsons-style vision of modernist living seemed inevitable. The buildings of this age of optimism, like Antti Lovag's Bubble House, and John Lautner's Chemosphere (see overleaf), didn't tack gadgets on as an afterthought, but sought to blend electronic technology seamlessly with living spaces.

But somewhere between the middle of the last century and present day, architecture was thrown off track. The idea that consumer electronics would be part of the fabric of our homes, as predicted by so many world fairs, gave way to a situation where gadgets are stuck clumsily to our walls and our appliances are garish and blocky. Today, fridges are splattered with tragic marketing messages such as "Frost-free freedom performance"; and home entertainment centres sit unapologetically, like Daleks, in the corners of living rooms, trailing wires everywhere.

Our houses are often at war with the gadgets we put inside them. While the electronics industry is masterful at creating consumer desire with its grand claims of higher-resolution televisions and bigger hard-disk video recorders, it appears to have very little interest in making our homes attractive places to live. In fact, the biggest concession to aesthetics that most manufacturers have made is to colour part of their range pink. A horribly misguided decision when you consider that a 2007 survey by Saatchi & Saatchi found that only nine per cent of British women find pink gadgets in the slightest bit appealing.

The problem with garish gadgets is not a new one. Our homes began their feud with consumer electronics as early as the 1930s, when General Electric unveiled their "House of Magic". Brian Horrigan is curator of the Minnesota Historical Society and prolific commentator of visions of the future. In his 1986 essay The Home of Tomorrow he wrote scathingly, "[The House of Magic] was not really a separate structure but a gimmicky update on the department store 'demo' home, a kind of stage-set on which glamorous women were cast as housewives, running the household machinery and making a sales pitch... they were attracted by a shinier side of the Home of Tomorrow coin: the house as a wonderland of gadgets."

Horrigan's description will chime with anyone who visited the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year. CES is the biggest gadget show on earth. Held each year in massive aircraft hangars in the middle of the Nevada desert, it is supposed to showcase the best products the electronics industry has to offer the home, but it has gone mad with the heat, and become increasingly detached from reality.

Almost nothing at CES looks like an attractive addition to the home, and yet it represents the industry's best efforts. This growing sense of disillusionment was summed up by Wired magazine, which called CES "limned with a general awareness that it's become a sprawling waste of time, energy and money".

Every year, CES attendees are treated to techno-leviathan Microsoft unveiling their ever-more implausible and less practical "Home Of The Future". The most ludicrous example of this was in 2007, when Bill Gates first revealed the "Surface", a $10,000 kitchen table with a projector and motion sensor attached. This bulky horror showed just how profoundly Microsoft doesn't understand the home environment. It was brilliantly aped in a YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY).

The idea that gadgets are something to be jammed, wedged and plugged into our homes rather than calmly integrated with them has circulated for so long that it seems natural to us.

Ask yourself why you tolerate the big SONY logo slathered across the front of your TV, while you don't expect Dulux to stencil its insignia on your walls, or Habitat brashly to cover your sofa with catch-phrases like "Foam Inside".

The trouble is that the electronic invaders which dominate our homes and usurp our furniture nowadays simply don't seem to have very much taste.

London Design Week, Chelsea Harbour Design Centre, SW10, starts March 9-11 (trade) and the public March 12-14 (020 7225 9101, www.designcentrechelseaharbour.co.uk). Special events include a masterclass, Entertaining in Style, on Wednesday 12, 10am-3pm, with demonstrations by florist Paula Pryke, a book signing by Caroline Clifton-Mogg, and a cookery display by Tamasin Day-Lewis.

'Architects who made London' at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1, runs until May 25 (020 7300 5839, www.royalacademy.org.uk/architecture) is an exhibition of drawings and plans from six leading architects including Sir Edwin Lutyens, Norman Shaw and Berthold Lubetkin.

Grow your own buildings MIT architect Mitchell Joachim has been working on a building called the Fab Tree Hab, which is constructed out of living trees. These trees are physically bound together to form a solid structure. The next step would be to genetically engineer a tree to grow in the shape of a house.

The tree would form walls and floors as it matured, and grow a new extension every year.

Solar-powered homes This is one prediction from the 1960s that might just come true. British weather might often be a disappointment, but even here solar water heating can provide a third of a household's hot water needs. Micro generation of power by solar panel is also increasingly popular, and you can sell any excess back to the grid, provided your annual generation is greater than 500kWh. For more information go to www.ecocentre.org.uk/selling-electricity-back-to-the-grid.html

…And a couple which, er, don't

Dome living Walt Disney intended his Epcot centre in Disneyworld to be covered by a massive climate-controlled dome, but even though the Disney corporation spent billions of dollars on Walt's utopian city, they never got round to the dome part. The enormous cost of a climate-controlled city tends to put it out of the running, though Richard Rogers wanted to glass over the South Bank Centre a few years ago.

Flying cars A sci-fi staple from The Jetsons to Blade Runner, the flying car always seemed like the natural evolution of the family runaround. But the struggle to make ordinary cars a bit less environmentally damaging has put flying cars on to the back burner for a while.